The
fascinating history of Nottingham’s world-famous Raleigh bicycle factory has
been captured for the 21st century in a new website and smartphone
app to be launched this week at The University of Nottingham.

The
‘I worked at Raleigh’ app and website are the culmination of a three year
collaboration between the University and theatrical event team Excavate
(formerly Hanby and Barrett) to research the history of this iconic factory and
bring it to a wider audience.

Raleigh’s
enormous factory on Triumph Road in Nottingham employed thousands of local
people from the 1950s until it shut down in 2002 ending more than a hundred
years of bicycle manufacturing in the city. The site is now home to the
University’s award-winning Jubilee campus.

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The
Raleigh Project has involved researchers from the Schools of Computer Science,
Education, English and History who have worked with writer-performers from
Excavate to create community events and historical resources for future
generations.

Over
the past three years the team has been gathering archive material, interviewing
former Raleigh workers and staging events and performances to bring Raleigh
back to life. The app and website will allow users to ‘walk’ the site of the
former factory, hearing voices and seeing images from the past as they stand in
the place where once thousands of people worked making bicycles.

Professor
Christine Hall, Head of the School of Education, said: “This project has been
about capturing the voices and stories of local people who worked at Raleigh,
an industry which has been hugely important to the history of Nottingham. We
wanted to explore and celebrate the history of our site and make what we found
out available to as wide an audience as possible. So we hope that the website
will be used in schools, in the university and by anyone interested in local
history, and that visitors to the Jubilee Campus will enjoy using the
app.”

Writer
Andy Barrett from Excavate said: “We really wanted to tell the story of this
iconic Nottingham factory from the people who worked there; from across the
ages and across the many, many departments. And of course, the best way to do
that is to go and meet the workers, to have a cup of tea and to chat. People
have a real attachment to the factory which came across in the stories that
they told.”

Producer
Julian Hanby added: “We’re really proud of both the quality and quantity of
material that the website contains. The site isn’t an official history of the
company, with lists of statistics; it is a collection of memories of what it
was really like to work at a huge twentieth century factory.”

The
‘I worked at Raleigh’ website and app will be launched at a public event in the
Exchange Building on Jubilee campus at 6pm on Thursday 13th March
2014. Registration for the event is available via Heidi Mather in the School of
Education: heidi.mather@nottingham.ac.uk

Our academics can now be interviewed for broadcast via our new Globelynx fixed camera facility at the University. For further information please contact a member of the Communications team on +44 (0)115 951 5798, email mediahub@nottingham.ac.uk or see the Globelynx website for how to register for this service.

Notes to editors: The University of Nottinghamhas 43,000 students and is ‘the nearest Britain has to a truly global university, with campuses in China and Malaysia modelled on a headquarters that is among the most attractive in Britain’ (Times Good University Guide 2014). It is also the most popular university among graduate employers, the world’s greenest university, and winner of the Times Higher Education Award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Sustainable Development’. It is ranked in the World's Top 75 universities by the QS World University Rankings.